Only Begrudgingly, Eh?

Bettina Bildhauer, lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews who published "Medieval Blood" last year, reviewed this book this week:-

Caroline Walker Bynum
WONDERFUL BLOOD
Theology and practice in late medieval Northern Germany and beyond
448pp. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

and notes:

Caroline Walker Bynum’s Wonderful Blood in turn makes us see Christ’s blood, and see it everywhere in late-medieval Christianity: it streams from his wound on the Cross; it gushes into the waiting mouth of believers meditating on the Eucharist; it cakes on his forehead in the Passion; it soaks the earth of Golgotha; it miraculously appears when Eucharistic hosts are stolen or abused; it imprints the heart of devoted Christians; it saves, washes and nourishes all; in short, it emerges as the central object of Northern European spirituality in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

...Bynum begins by describing the debates and practices of the famous controversial pilgrimage to “the blood” at Wilsnack, Brandenburg, to three abused Eucharistic hosts on which drops of blood had allegedly appeared. Bynum then links the Wilsnack cult with several other Northern German pilgrimages to various kinds of Christ’s blood, and contextualizes these cults further in the surprisingly numerous, and partly forgotten, theological debates about it. Briefly sketching the discussions of Christ’s blood in the Eucharist (well explored since Bynum’s seminal Holy Feast and Holy Fast), she gives welcome accounts of the lesser-known controversies on whether the blood, as it appeared in host miracles or in relics of the Crucifixion, could indeed have been left behind on earth after the Resurrection; whether it decomposed or remained fresh after Jesus’s death; and what happened to it during the three days between his dying and rising. According to Bynum, these were important issues for theologians as well as for laypeople, who venerated Christ’s blood in the Passion, in relics and in the Eucharist, because they encapsulated their hopes for eternal life and access to the supernatural realm. The recurrent core of the theological and devotional beliefs about Christ’s blood, according to Bynum, was that it remained on earth, independently of his body, even beyond his death and Resurrection.

Well, you by now know what's been bothering me and sure enough here it comes:-

While she has done plenty to revalue the much-maligned medieval theology and piety, she now perhaps paints too rosy a picture of the spiritual comfort it offers, only grudgingly acknowledging the horrendous anti-Semitism intermingled with much devotion to Christ’s blood even before the Reformation, and blending out all misogyny.

Ah, so that's where the blood libel comes from.